In the area of biology and medicine, understanding cells and their supporting structures in tissues, tracking their structure and distribution changes are very important. Histology, the study of the microscopic anatomy of tissues, is essential in disease diagnosis, medicinal development and many other fields. In histology, the process of examining a thin slice of tissue sample under a light microscope or electron microscope is generally performed. In order to visualize and differentiate various microscopic biological substances, one common approach is to stain the tissue sample with a combination of several dyes that have selective responses to the presence of different biological substances. In doing so, specified biological substances such as nuclei, cytoplasm, membranes, disease markers, specific proteins and other structures, are visually enhanced, thereby facilitating detection and localization of these microscopic biological substances. In many instances diseased tissues present specific anatomical and physiological alterations that can be detected using histological analysis.
Various cancer cells contain proteins or other biomolecules that are either absent or expressed at a different level in normal tissue. Such proteins or biomolecules are referred to as cancer markers. Cancer markers are typically used for diagnosis and/or targeted therapy. For example, estrogen receptors (ER) and progesterone receptors (PR) are generally accepted as markers for breast cancer. In many instances, tests for receptor status, such as status of estrogen receptors (ER) and progesterone receptors (PR) of breast cancer tissue is performed for identifying an effective chemotherapy regimen. The receptor status may be determined using an immunohistochemistry (IHC) staining process that involves use of receptor specific stains to stain cancer cells so as to aid in their visualization.
ER or PR IHC test results are represented by an ER/PR “score”. Currently, the process of generating an ER/PR “score” is often based on the manual visual analysis of an examining pathologist. Current automatic scoring techniques provide inconsistent results due to improper identification of stained cancer cells. Further, the process is time consuming and results are often inconsistent.
Therefore there is a need in the art for an efficient method and apparatus for identification of stained cancer cells in automatic ER/PR scoring of tissue samples.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application and with reference to the drawings.